June 26, 2017 – My kid is addicted to medal games

I have written about medal games before and 10 years later I still don’t understand the appeal. One person who does understand is my son, Tiny Dog. He is absolutely addicted to medal games.

The idea of the game is to buy a bunch of small metallic discs (medals) and feed them into a machine, aiming at a moving tray covered in more medals. The goal is to have your medal push some of the other medals to the lower level. This in turn (hopefully) pushes even more medals off the lower level and out of the machine. The medals you win can then be fed back into the machine in hopes of winning even more. Some machines offer fancy bonuses which will randomly dump more medals into the playing area while lights blink and music plays. It’s total sensory overload.

It’s worth noting that you can’t actually do anything with the medals you win other than play medal games.

TD saw his first medal machine a few days ago in Yokohama. Today we played the game above at Ito Yokado, and also got some time on the medal games in Bivi near the station. In total he probably logged about an hour on the games and I likely spent about $50. If I had kept buying more medals he would have kept playing.

Originally I thought that our medal game experience was a waste of time and money. Looking back I’m happy that TD had fun doing something uniquely Japanese that he couldn’t do in Canada. Also, any quality time I can spend with my kid is a good thing.